What Calling Congress Achieves

It’s said to be the most effective way to petition the government, but does it really make a difference?

Since the election, constituents have contacted Congress in unprecedented numbers.

Illustration by Oliver Munday / Source: Gary Ombler / Getty (phone)

Of all the liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the most underrated by far is the one that gives us the right to complain to our elected officials. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly: all of these are far more widely known, legislated, and litigated than the right to—as the founders rather tactfully put it—“petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

There are a great many ways to petition the government, including with actual petitions, but, short of showing up in person, the one reputed to be the most effective is picking up the phone and calling your congressional representatives. In the weeks following the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump, so many people started doing so that, in short order, voice mail filled up and landlines began blurting out busy signals. Pretty soon, even e-mails were bouncing back, with the information that the target in-box was full and the suggestion that senders “contact the recipient directly.” That being impractical, motivated constituents turned to other means. The thwarted and outraged took to Facebook or Twitter or the streets. The thwarted and determined dug up direct contact information for specific congressional staffers. The thwarted and clever remembered that it was still possible, several technological generations later, to send faxes; one Republican senator received, from a single Web-based faxing service, seven thousand two hundred and seventy-six of them in twenty-four hours. The thwarted and creative phoned up a local pizza joint, ordered a pie, and had it delivered, with a side of political opinion, to the Senate.

Americans vote, if we vote at all, roughly once every two years. But even in a slow season, when no one is resorting to faxes or protests or pizza-grams, we participate in the political life of our nation vastly more often by reaching out to our members of Congress. When we do so, however, we almost never get to speak to them directly. Instead, we wind up dealing with one of the thousands of people, many of them too young to rent a car, who collectively constitute the customer-service workforce of democracy.

For them, as for so many of us, life in the past several weeks has taken a turn for the strange and exhausting. Politically minded citizens who went to work for Congress now find themselves in the situation of airline agents during a Category 4 hurricane: a relatively small cohort with limited resources encounters a huge number of people up in arms. If you tried to call a federal legislator anytime in the past several weeks (and, full disclosure, I did: for almost my entire adult life, I have been the kind of person who likes to talk to her elected officials, from school-board members on up to senators), you were as likely as not to reach an automated recording informing you that your call could not be answered, “due to an unusually high call volume.”

Bureaucratically speaking, those are some of the most irritating words on the planet. But, politically speaking, they are the start of a tantalizing sentence: Due to an unusually high call volume, what? At present, an enormous number of people are calling their political representatives, not always to obvious effect. So what difference does it really make in the minds of lawmakers—and, more to the point, on the floors of the House and the Senate—when large numbers of everyday people start contacting Congress?

In 1876, the centenary of American independence, Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone, and that device has been mixed up with our national politics ever since. The following year, Rutherford B. Hayes had one installed in the White House. (Its phone number was “1.”) Three years later, the technology came to Capitol Hill, in the form of a single phone placed in the lobby of the House of Representatives, where it was answered, increasingly often and increasingly to his inconvenience, by the House doorkeeper. More phones appeared soon afterward, but demand kept outstripping supply, until, eventually, Congress purchased a hundred-line switchboard, placed it in the Capitol Building, and, in 1898, hired a young woman named Harriott Daley to operate it.

“A brisk, pleasant little woman with probably the most important unofficial position in the United States Congress”: that is how a newspaper correspondent once described Daley, who was twenty-five, widowed, and raising a young daughter when she took the job. In the beginning, she worked alone, from eight in the morning until as late as midnight, answering some two hundred calls a day across all of Congress. By the middle of the twentieth century, that number had increased to sixty thousand, or almost twenty-two million calls a year, and the telephone staff had grown in tandem. By the time Daley retired, in 1945, she oversaw fifty other operators, colloquially known as Hello Girls. Also by then, she could reputedly recognize some ninety-six senators, three hundred and ninety-four representatives, and three hundred journalists by the sound of their voices.

Almost as soon as Daley began answering the phones, everyday citizens began using them to give legislators a piece of their mind. In 1928, an oil and gas company urged citizens to call their senators to oppose a gas tax; sometime later, a Utah gentleman published a poem urging people to call their senators to request better wintertime road-clearing. Other early telephone activists called Congress about other concerns: the Selective Service, school funding, Social Security legislation, power-company regulation, the agricultural potential of sugar beets. By mid-century, a Marjorie Lansing, of Massachusetts, was travelling around the country encouraging constituents to adopt “the pester technique”: “Call your senator in his office, call him at home late at night, call him in the morning before he’s had his breakfast eggs.” Even members of Congress sometimes urged people to call members of Congress: in 1941, Representative Jeannette Rankin, of Montana, told those opposed to American involvement in the Second World War to “call your congressman by telephone every day and tell him how you feel.”

Today, thanks to the Internet-as-all-purpose-phone-book, it is easier than ever to call your Congress members, by bypassing the switchboard and phoning their offices directly. If you do so, your call will be answered not by a Capitol operator (today, they number only in the couple of dozen) but, most likely, by a staff assistant or an intern. Staff assistants are typically recent college graduates, twenty-three or twenty-four years old, learning the ropes of American politics before they go off to get a business degree or a master’s in political science. Interns tend to be even younger—nineteen- and twenty-year-olds taking a summer job or some time off from school—although they do basically the same work, usually minus the salary. Together, these staffers can be found working for the five hundred and thirty-five voting members of Congress, the forty-nine congressional committees, commissions, and caucuses, and the district office of every lawmaker in every state. An exact head count is hard to come by, but the congressional employees whose time is mostly spent fielding constituent messages number in the thousands.

How seriously those messages are taken by Congress varies widely, chiefly because, when it comes to interacting with the public, there’s really no such thing as Congress per se. There are five hundred and thirty-five small businesses that together form the legislative arm of government, and their way of dealing with constituents can differ as much as their politics. As a logistical matter, however, most congressional offices function in roughly the same way. No matter how a message comes in—by phone, e-mail, post, fax, carrier pigeon—it is entered into a software program known as a constituent-management system. Owing to stringent security requirements, only a few of these systems are authorized by Congress, and many members use one called Intranet Quorum, made by Leidos, a Virginia-based defense contractor and technology company. Like many things the federal government purchases from such companies, it is expensive, as are the other human and technological resources that go into fielding the concerns of average Americans. According to Bradford Fitch, the President of the Congressional Management Foundation (C.M.F.), a nonpartisan nonprofit group that works to improve the efficacy of interactions between citizens and lawmakers, constituent communications account for twenty to thirty per cent of the budget for every congressional office on Capitol Hill.

Exactly how many calls and e-mails and the like are collectively entered into constituent-management systems is impossible to say, because members of Congress are under no obligation to release that data. The same goes for district offices, which, in some cases, don’t even keep those figures for themselves. (They do typically share with their D.C. headquarters the gist of incoming communications, if not a precise tally.) The Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper tracks both average and peak call volumes to the switchboard, but declines to make that information public, for reasons it likewise keeps to itself: possibly to prevent denial-of-service attacks, possibly to deter competitively minded constituents from trying to set new records.

Unlike call volume, the data on mail sent to Congress is public, and it suggests that, at least among the politically active, the U.S. Postal Service remains popular; the Senate alone received more than 6.4 million letters last year. Contrary to popular opinion, those written communications are an effective way of communicating with Congress, as are their electronic kin. “Everything is read, every call and voice mail is listened to,” Isaiah Akin, the deputy legislative director for Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden, told me. “We don’t discriminate when it comes to phone versus e-mail versus letter.”

As it turns out, some less egalitarian offices do discriminate, but not in the direction you might expect. According to a 2015 C.M.F. survey of almost two hundred senior congressional staffers, when it comes to influencing a lawmaker’s opinion, personalized e-mails, personalized letters, and editorials in local newspapers all beat out the telephone.

In normal times, then—which is to say, in the times we don’t currently live in—calling your members of Congress is not an intrinsically superior way to get them to listen. But what makes a particular type of message effective depends largely on what you are trying to achieve. For mass protests, such as those that have been happening recently, phone calls are a better way of contacting lawmakers, not because they get taken more seriously but because they take up more time—thereby occupying staff, obstructing business as usual, and attracting media attention. E-mails get the message through but are comparatively swift and easy for staffers to process, while conventional mail is at a disadvantage when speed matters, since, in addition to the time spent in transit, anything sent to Congress is temporarily held for testing and decontamination, to protect employees from mail bombs and toxins. Afterward, most constituent mail is scanned and forwarded to congressional offices as an electronic image. In other words, your letter will not arrive overnight, and it will not arrive with those grains of Iowa wheat or eau de constituent you put in it. But, once it shows up, it will be taken at least as seriously as a call.

Some forms of correspondence, however, do not carry quite as much weight, starting with anything that comes from outside a legislator’s district or state. Carter Moore, a former staff assistant for the late congresswoman Julia Carson, of Indiana, recounted an anecdote about a constituent who decided to write a letter on immigration to every member of Congress. One morning, Moore came in to work and found, piled up in his office, hundreds of identical envelopes, forwarded unopened. Other messages that staffers tend to disregard include tweets and Facebook posts (less out of dismissiveness than because of the difficulty of determining if they come from constituents), online petitions (because they require so little effort that they aren’t seen as meaningful), comments submitted through apps like Countable, and mass e-mails that originate from the Web sites of advocacy groups. (These last have a particularly bad reputation. According to the C.M.F., almost half of staffers believe, incorrectly, that they are sent without the constituent’s knowledge.)

Likewise, phone calls that hew to scripts from advocacy organizations usually get downgraded, especially if the caller seems ill-informed about the issue. Such calls also tend to annoy staffers. “You could tell when you walked in the office by how the staff was responding that they were getting the same call over and over,” Josiah Bonner, a former Republican congressman from Alabama, said. (Jo Bonner, as he is known, was the victim of one of the few recurring errors made by the congressional operators, a result of having served in the House at the same time as John Boehner. “Not infrequently, I’d pick up the phone,” he told me, “and someone would say, ‘I’d like to tell the Speaker to go straight to hell.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I’ll be sure to get him the message.’ ”)

Regardless of how they choose to do so, most people who contact Congress have legitimate concerns—but, as any staffer can tell you, there is a small but enduring subgroup of wiseacres and crackpots. Moore, the former congressional staffer, once took a call from a man who claimed, in all seriousness, to be the true and rightful owner of the moon. (“Pause, obviously,” Moore said. “And then I was, like, ‘I’m sorry, I missed that, can you say it again?’ ”) For a while in the early two-thousands, a gentleman from parts unknown phoned up after hours several times a week and left dirty limericks—a new one each time—on the voice mails of dozens of senators. Conspiracy theorists love to call Congress, and do so in droves: to claim that 9/11 was an inside job; to demand investigation into a train-maintenance yard ostensibly meant to serve as a FEMA-run concentration camp when the government declares martial law; to warn about the impending conquest of the United States by the Queen of England.

Such oddities aside, most communications to Congress fall into one of two categories. In the first, known as constituent services, callers have a specific problem with a federal agency and want their senator or representative to help solve it: by securing an honor guard for a veteran’s funeral, resolving a filing issue with the Social Security Administration, nominating an aspiring cadet to West Point, obtaining political asylum for an imperilled relative, or helping out with an overseas adoption. The second category, conversely, might be called constituent demands: someone calls and expresses a political preference to anyone who answers the phone and hopes that his or her legislator will act on it. It is a curious thing about Americans that we simultaneously believe nothing gets done in Congress and have faith that this strategy works.

Actually, this strategy does work in a surprising number of cases, though probably not the ones that you’re thinking of. If you ask your senator to co-sponsor a bill on mud-flap dimensions or to propose a change to the bottling requirements for apple cider or to vote in favor of increased funding for a rare childhood disease, you stand a decent chance of succeeding. This is not a trivial point, since such requests make up the majority of those raised by constituents. (They also represent the underappreciated but crucial role that average citizens play in the legislative process. “I’ve written bills that became law because people called to complain about a particular issue I was unaware of,” Akin, of Senator Wyden’s office, said. It was constituents, for instance, who educated Congress about America’s opioid crisis and got members to dedicate funds and draft health legislation to begin dealing with it.)

If, however, you want a member of Congress to vote your way on a matter of intense partisan fervor—immigration, education, entitlement programs, health insurance, climate change, gun control, abortion—your odds of success are, to understate matters, considerably slimmer. To borrow an example from the C.M.F.’s Brad Fitch, four well-informed doctors might persuade a senator to support the use of a certain surgical procedure in V.A. hospitals, but four hundred thousand phone calls to Senator John McCain are unlikely to change his position on the appropriate use of American military power overseas.

That kind of policy change isn’t impossible, and it isn’t unprecedented, but it is extremely rare. When I asked past and present Congress members and high-level staffers if constituent input mattered, all of them emphasized that it absolutely does. But when I asked them to name a time that a legislator had changed his or her vote on the basis of such input, I got, in every instance, a laugh, and then a very long pause.

It’s easy to chalk that reaction up to embarrassment, as if Congress members had been caught paying lip service to constituents while voting in accordance with other influences: party leadership, polling, lobbyists, interest groups, donors, the dictates of conscience. And it is true that those influences are potent, while our own has been compromised in recent times by gerrymandering; politicians in the safe districts which that practice creates are still vulnerable to challenges from their base, as the Tea Party demonstrated in 2010, but oppositional voices, like oppositional votes, are less effective than they once were. But those very long pauses also reflected a legitimate and enduring conundrum of political theory: to what extent the job of a representative is to represent.

“We want people to know their voices are being heard,” Phil Novack, the press secretary for Ted Cruz, told me, before going on to say, essentially, that they wouldn’t be heeded: “The senator was elected based on certain values and ideals, and he’s going to keep fighting for those, even though some of his constituents might disagree.” That may be frustrating, but it isn’t dodging or doublespeak, and it certainly isn’t an attitude found only on one side of the aisle; it’s a particular belief about the role a lawmaker should play in a representative democracy. Edmund Burke said roughly the same thing more than two centuries ago, while describing the relationship between a legislator and his constituents: “Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention.” You can almost hear the “but” coming, and then it does. “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

By this theory of governance, it should be difficult for average citizens to influence a lawmaker’s vote. For one thing, those lawmakers have access to information and expertise unavailable to the rest of us. Jo Bonner described voting for TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, over both his own distaste and the vociferous objections of his constituents, after listening to everyone from the head of the Federal Reserve to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers explain why the American economy would tank if he didn’t.

For another, everyone loves the idea of Congress members heeding their constituents, right up until we disagree with what those constituents think. Fitch told me that he once stopped by a senator’s office shortly before a vote on legislation, drafted after the massacre at Sandy Hook, to close loopholes in gun regulations. The senator hailed from a deep-red state, and the phones were ringing off the hook. Fitch asked the harried assistant if the calls were running ninety-nine to one against the proposed legislation. The assistant said, “Yes, except for the one.” Every single caller opposed the bill. The senator voted for it anyway.

For all that, constituents are not voiceless in a democracy, and every once in a while they do score major legislative wins. In 1989, Congress tried to give itself a fifty-per-cent pay raise, and the American public rebelled. In late 2005, the House passed a heavily lobbied-for immigration-reform bill that increased fines and prison sentences on the undocumented and made it a crime to offer them certain kinds of aid; its chances in the Senate were then swiftly tanked by a citizen uprising, including one of the first successful mass mobilizations of the Latino community against a piece of legislation. In 2012, what should have been a pair of obscure little intellectual-property bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (sopa) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), provoked such a massive outcry that nearly a fifth of senators withdrew their support in a single day, and the acts were effectively killed.

Why constituents succeeded in making themselves heard in these cases while failing in others is difficult to say; political causality is famously, enormously complicated. (Consider the quantity of ink that was spilled just trying to account for Trump’s victory.) Kristina Miler, a political scientist at the University of Maryland and the author of the book “Constituency Representation in Congress,” has argued that activism works in part simply by making previously hidden segments of the population more visible to legislators. Tasked with representing anywhere from seven hundred and fifty thousand people to tens of millions of them, most lawmakers are familiar with only a tiny fraction of their district or state. But, in a series of surveys and experiments, Miler found that hearing from citizens changed lawmakers’ mental maps and, in doing so, altered how they legislate. (SOPA is a good example of this. Before it failed, Congress members considering an intellectual-property bill were most likely to think about its potential impact on major copyright holders like the Walt Disney Corporation. Today, no one can contemplate such legislation without remembering other constituents, from librarians to the tech community, and adjusting plans and votes accordingly.)

For constituent activity to have more immediate effects on the actions of lawmakers, however, other conditions—most of them necessary, none of them necessarily sufficient—must apply. Broadly speaking, these include a huge quantity of people acting in concert, an unusually high pitch of passion, a specific countervailing vision, and consistent press coverage unfavorable to sitting politicians. Together, these can create the most potent condition of all: the possibility (or, at any rate, the fear) that the collective restiveness could jeopardize reëlection.

Such conditions do not emerge very often in American politics, but, when they do, pundits routinely describe them with recourse to the metaphor of a flood. Calls pour in; dams threaten to burst; legislators are deluged, inundated, swamped. “It’s kind of like water flowing down into a dam,” Fitch said. “If a hundred cubic feet of water flows down over a period of three weeks, it’s not going to put pressure on the dam. But if a hundred cubic feet of water flows down in three minutes, something’s going to give.”

That language is vivid but hardly precise, so I asked Carter Moore how he might quantify a flood. “If you start seeing tweets or Facebook posts saying, ‘Tried to call but got a busy signal,’ that’s one sign,” he said. “If everybody in your office has been pulled off their regular duties to answer calls but the line is still clogged, that’s usually a sign, too.” In terms of actual call volume, he noted that flood levels depend, as they do in real life, on terrain; at baseline, representatives of populous districts with major media centers get more calls than those from Idaho or Wyoming. “Still, if the calls are coming in at forty an hour,” Moore said, “something interesting is happening. If a member of Congress is presented at the end of the day with around six hundred to a thousand unique calls, I’d call that a flood.”

Well, call it a flood. Call it, like Noah, the flood. Never mind the end of the day; last month, Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, got three thousand calls in one night. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, got thirty-one thousand in three weeks. Last year, in a fourteen-day period in January, Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, got a thousand pieces of mail on the subject of education; this year, during that same period, he got forty-five thousand. Compared with 2016, his over-all constituent correspondence shot up nine hundred per cent. Members of Congress claim that, Senate-wide, the call volume for the week of January 30, 2017, more than doubled the previous record; on average, during that week, the Senate got 1.5 million calls a day. Three of those days—January 31st, February 1st, and February 2nd—were the busiest in the history of the Capitol switchboard. (Even those numbers are necessarily underestimates. Once the lines are all busy and the voice mail is maxed out, all the other calls coming in go undetected, a storm after the rain gauge is full.)

Unlike most political protests, this recent surge in citizen action has not been limited to a single issue. Many early calls were about Betsy DeVos, Trump’s then-nominee for Secretary of Education, but they quickly extended to include other Cabinet nominations, the executive order on immigration, the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act, tax returns, ethical violations, Russian involvement in the elections and with the Trump Administration, and Steve Bannon’s presence on the National Security Council, among other areas of concern. Nor have callers been limited to the so-called coastal élites. People have taken not only to the phone but to the streets in cities and towns all around the country—in Oklahoma and Nebraska and Anchorage, Alaska; in Auburn, Alabama, and Little Rock, Arkansas, and Beckley, West Virginia. They have also taken to attending real and virtual town halls in truly staggering numbers. One House member, who typically has three or four thousand constituents call in to his telephone town halls, found himself joined at his latest one by eleven thousand constituents.

For political watchers, the most striking thing about this outpouring of political activism is its spontaneity. “If Planned Parenthood sends out an e-mail and asks all their donors to contact their Congress members—that’s honest, it’s real, it’s citizen action,” Fitch said. “But this thing was organic: people saw something in the news, it made them angry, and they called their member of Congress.” At this point, he paused and informed me that he was “not one for hyperbolic statements.” But what was happening was, he said, “amazing,” “unprecedented,” “a level of citizen engagement going on out there outside the Beltway that Congress has never experienced before.”

In point of fact, most of the citizens doing that engaging have never experienced it before, either. “I generally don’t like talking on the phone that much,” Mikayla Dreyer, a registered Independent in Missouri, told me. “I’m a millennial, and that’s not our thing.” Since January, though, she’s got over it. “I commute a lot to work, so I have down time. I have Bluetooth set up in my car and I just say, ‘O.K., call Roy Blunt’s D.C. office’ every day now. That’s my routine.” She sent me a picture of her call log; in the thirty-five days from December 30th to February 2nd, she’d called Congress thirty-seven times. Belinda Rollens, who is eighty and lives in Tennessee with her husband of sixty-two years, was last given to writing her representatives during Watergate, almost half a century ago. Lately, though, she has taken to regularly e-mailing her senators. (“Senator Corker always responds quickly, saying, ‘Thank you for contacting me,’ ” she said. “Lamar Alexander never says boo.”) “This is such an unusual situation,” she told me, “that I think anyone who can sit up and get to a computer should make themselves heard.”

There is nothing particularly exceptional about these stories, which is the point. What’s exceptional is how common they have become. “Protest Is the New Brunch,” a sign at a rally outside Trump Tower in February read—the point being not only that citizen engagement is something to do on a Sunday morning but that it is a new kind of socializing: a way to see old friends and meet new ones, a way to combat the political equivalent of a very rough Saturday night. (“It’s good for my mood,” Dreyer said about her call-a-day habit. “When I’m not actively standing up and doing something, I get dragged down and start to feel hopeless.”) Moreover, for many people, including some who slept through high-school civics, the past several weeks have been a kind of adult-education seminar in American government. Whatever else it will change, in other words, this surge of grass-roots activism is already changing the people who participate in it. And that change can bring about others: today’s newly engaged citizen might be 2018’s motivated midterm voter, or 2020’s brand-new city council member, or the dark-horse victor in a Senate race in 2024.

In the meantime, other, more direct effects of this activism are already apparent. On January 2nd, House Republicans voted in secret to defang the Office of Congressional Ethics; less than twenty-four hours later, following what seemed at the time like a deluge of calls but later turned out to be just that loud patter you hear on your window before the storm really begins, they reversed their decision. On January 24th, Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, introduced a proposal to sell off 3.3 million acres of federal land. Barely a week later, on February 1st, he withdrew it, after getting an earful. “Groups I support and care about fear it sends the wrong message,” he explained. “I hear you and H.R. 621 dies tomorrow.”

Most unanticipated of all, Republicans have been stalling and backpedalling on the Affordable Care Act, which was originally expected to be the earliest, fastest, and most thorough casualty of the Trump Administration. Like nearly everyone I spoke with, Chad Chitwood, a former congressional staffer, attributed the fact that it’s still around chiefly to constituents clamoring to keep it. “Watching the way that the Republican Party was gleeful at being able to get rid of the A.C.A. and then started hearing from people who did not realize they were on it or did not realize what was going to happen if it was taken away—I think that’s why we’re seeing the slowdown,” he said. “Otherwise, they would have already taken it away.”

Perhaps the most striking shift so far, though, has happened on the Democratic side of the aisle, in the form of a swift and dramatic stiffening of the spine. In the past month, at the insistence of constituents, the party line has changed from a cautious willingness to work with the White House to staunch and nearly unified opposition. “If you ask me, before the calls started coming in, someone like Neil Gorsuch”—Trump’s pick for the vacant Supreme Court seat—“would have passed with seventy-one votes,” said one Democratic senator’s chief of staff, who has worked on the Hill for close to twenty years. “Now I’d be surprised if he gets to sixty.” More generally, that staffer noted, the newly galvanized left is suddenly helping to set the Party’s agenda. In thinking about Cabinet nominations, Democratic members of Congress had planned to make their stand over Tom Price, then the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services—until their constituents chose Betsy DeVos. “That was not a strategic decision made in Washington,” the staffer said. “That was a very personal decision made by all these people outside the Beltway worrying about their kids. We’re not managing this resistance. We can participate in it, but there’s no chance of us managing it.”

Republicans, of course, can’t manage the resistance, either—and, so far, they are struggling to figure out how to respond. Some have merely expressed frustration that so many calls are apparently coming from out of their district or state. But others, including Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Cory Gardner, and President Trump, have tried to discredit concerned citizens by claiming that they are “paid protesters,” an allegation supported by precisely zero evidence. Still others have expressed disingenuous outrage over political organizing, as when Tim Murtaugh, a spokesperson for Representative Lou Barletta, of Pennsylvania, criticized “the significant percentage who are encouraged to call us by some group.” And other legislators simply turned out not to like their job description. “Since Obamacare and these issues have come up,” Representative Dave Brat, of Virginia, said last month, “the women are in my grill no matter where I go.” In an apparent effort to dodge such interactions, a number of Republican legislators, including Representative Mike Coffman, of Colorado, and Representative Peter Roskam, of Illinois, have cancelled or curtailed town-hall meetings. Other G.O.P. legislators have allegedly been locking their office doors, turning off their phones, and, in general, doing what they can to limit contact with their constituents.

That is not, of course, a viable long-term strategy; at a minimum, these lawmakers will need to begin showing their faces come reëlection season. The deluge of constituent pressure, by contrast, is a viable long-term strategy, but only if it is a long-term strategy—that is, only if those doing it choose to sustain it. That would mean persevering in the face of both short-term defeats and the potentially energy-sapping influence of time itself.

Such perseverance is by no means impossible; here, too, political causality is complex. Setbacks can as easily stoke as sap, movements may grow as well as wither, and every critical mass has, of necessity, been built from a subcritical one. Moreover, and luckily for democracy, none of us requires a guaranteed outcome in order to act. We all do plenty of things without knowing if or when or how or how much they will work: we say prayers, take multivitamins, give money to someone on Second Avenue who looks like she needs it. So, too, with calling and e-mailing and writing and showing up in congressional offices: it would be good to know that these actions will succeed, but it suffices to know that they could. And at this particular moment, when our First Amendment freedoms are existentially threatened—when the President himself has, among other things, sought to curb press access and to discredit dissent—we also act on them to insist that we can. The telephone might not be a superior medium for participatory democracy, but it is an excellent metaphor for it, and it reminds us of the rights we are promised as citizens. When we get disconnected, we can try to get through. When we get no answer, we can keep trying. When we have to, for as long as we need to, we can hold the line. ♦

This article appears in other versions of the March 6, 2017, issue, with the headline “Call and Response.”